1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a remote-controlled television Internet system and method, and more particularly, to a telephone interface and voice recognition driven Internet browser system and method for Internet accessing and browsing as well as other remote computing services on a cable or satellite television.
2. Description of Related Art
In entering into the twenty-first century, Internet business or e-commerce has become one of the largest industries and continues its growth exponentially. Many people's daily lives are closely related to the Internet business and are significantly impacted by the Internet technology's evolution and revolution. More and more people have used the Internet and even accessed/browsed the Internet in their daily lives, whether for work, entertainment, shopping, or education, etc. The Internet is creating a new economy, which is competing with people's traditional way of living.
Like many other new technology, Internet technology is facing many challenges and problems, particularly when Internet technology is penetrating into the general public. One of the main problems is that Internet accessing/browsing often requires one to know how to use a personal computer. At present, still the majority of the general public is not computer literate or may not care to be computer literate. Many people have found that a personal computer is clumsy, expensive to maintain and/or upgrade, and often not reliable. As a result, many people still avoid using a personal computer.
Further, even if one uses a personal computer, to access/browse the Internet is often problematic. For example, the Internet connection between a computer and Internet providers is often denied during a peak time, and the Internet connection is generally very slow in uploading/downloading Internet information. People have to pay much more monthly fees to obtain a relatively higher speed access to the Internet. Such fees put the access to the Internet out of reach of most people.
In addition, a personal computer is usually used for a lot of different applications, such as word processing, imaging designing, networking, email, Internet accessing/browsing web sites, etc. These applications and the computer itself are co-existed and generally operated by a complicated software operating system, thereby significantly slowing down the operations of the applications. The more applications are operated by an operating system, the slower the operation speed is. This significantly slows down the performance of the Internet accessing/browsing. The operation overhead of most personal computers is not optimized for advanced Internet performance like streaming video or other high volume data transmission applications.
Also, a personal computer does not provide a comfortable setting for people to surf the Internet for entertainment, shopping, education, etc. As a result, many people, even if they own a personal computer, have been looking for other alternatives to access the Internet.
Some recent Internet technology has demonstrated its ability to access/browse the Internet without a personal computer by using new types of devices broadly called “information appliance”—essentially, they are digital gadgets of various sizes and shapes, which are dedicated to surfing the Internet. Some devices resemble cable TV boxes, and some others look like small laptops, mobile phones, etc. Some devices are used to surf the Internet and access e-mails, and some others are strictly used to surf the Internet. While people have saved money from buying a personal computer, they are forced to purchase as well as maintain a new line of “information appliance” for different purposes. Furthermore, these new devices are basically small sized computers for different specific purposes. However, many people still are not interested in buying a new device just to surf the Internet.
The general public is used to conventional devices, such as televisions, phones, etc. Also, the majority of the general public has already owned these conventional devices. They are easy to operate and relatively reliable in performance. Therefore, there is a desire for the general public to access/browse the Internet via these conventional devices without using a personal computer, or other hardware equipment, such as modem, “information appliance”, etc. Just like many people have quit buying an answering machine for storing phone messages—instead, using a “hardware-less” voice messaging service—, there is a need to have a “hardware-less” Internet service to access/browse the Internet via conventional televisions and phones.
Most of the homes or offices have recently been wired for cable broadcast, which may hook to a set top box and a cable ready television, or wired for a satellite receiver to receive multiple television channels. It is desirable to use the existing cable wiring or satellite receiver to receive Internet information. More importantly, cables or satellite channels have much wider bandwidth to serve the general public than phone lines which computers are generally connected to. It is desirable to use the existing wide band cable or satellite systems to receive volumetric Internet information, such as streaming video, etc.
Internet TVs were proposed several years ago. Internet TVs were proposed to provide people the possibility of obtaining Internet access at a location, such as at home, by using only a regular cable TV set and an easy-to-use control device, such as a phone. For example, a concept of a telephone remote-controlled cable television Internet was once introduced, in which button keys of a push button-type telephone at a cable television subscriber's end are used to simulate functions of a computer mouse or a computer keyboard to remote-control, via a telephone network, an Internet main unit at a cable television provider's end, so as to acquire Internet resources around the world.
However, the proposed Internet TVs are very primitive and immature. Due to the communication channel band limitation, the proposed Internet TVs cannot serve multiple users or a large amount of users at the same time. In addition, there are privacy or other security concerns, which have not been addressed, in the proposed Internet TVs. Further, the push button-type telephone interface is not user-friendly. People are not used to relate the button keys or their corresponding English letters on a telephone to the represented functions or modes. Also, different telephones may have a different arrangement for the button keys. These make surfing the Internet very time consuming and uncomfortable. Furthermore, the button keys on a telephone may malfunction after a period of use. Moreover, quite a few people are still using conventional rotary telephones, which do not have push button keys.
The Internet TVs were proposed to allow a user to surf the Internet on TV. However, the proposed Internet TVs mainly provide a bridge between the Internet URL sources and the cable TV systems by stream downloading whatever the URL sources present. Users may not very easily browse Internet contents to find what they are looking for because the stream-downloaded Internet contents are merely related to certain URL sources or destinations. Many users have wasted a lot of time in looking for URL sources and/or in browsing Internet contents. Users often desire assistance in an interactive manner to not only find a URL source for certain Internet contents, but also have a user-friendly interface to find the URL source and go through the Internet contents. Also, the users would often like to organize Internet contents in a specific fashion.
It is with respect to these or other considerations that the present invention has been made.